On: TotalEnergies ordered to account for client emissions in landmark climate ruling

They call it a “landmark ruling.” Let us first rectify the name. A landmark is a fixed point from which one can navigate. If this ruling merely requires an accounting - a new column in a ledger - then it is not a landmark, but a signpost pointing in the correct direction while the road remains unbuilt. The name “accounting” is used, but the substance is “responsibility.” Does the one lead to the other? When a father is made to account for the actions of his grown son, but not to correct them, the ritual of accounting is empty. The relationship is still broken.

Here lies the deeper fault. The court has named a duty between corporation and client. But what is the nature of this bond? Is it the reciprocal duty of a teacher to a student, where guidance is given? Or of a ruler to subject, where protection is owed? No. It is the relationship of a well to those who draw from it. The well provides, but does not command how the water is used. To now say the well-keeper must account for every bucket spilled downstream is to confuse the source with the user. The duty is made to flow only one way: from the corporation, which extracted the resource, to the world, which demanded it. Where is the reciprocal duty of the client, of the society that built its ease upon this fuel? The relationship is severed, and so the ruling, however well-intentioned, places the entire burden upon one branch of a fallen tree.

The ritual they propose - this accounting - is a dead ritual if it ends with a report. A living ritual changes behavior. It is the morning inspection of the chariot axle, not the chronicling of its breakages. If the accounting does not compel the corporation to actively reduce what is counted, then it is merely a performance of concern. The junzi, the cultivated person within that company, would not hide behind the ledger. He would see that true vigilance means reshaping the offering itself. Yet what incentive structure rewards him for that? The system still rewards the volume of what is sold.

They have rectified a name, in court. But they have not yet rectified the relationship. Until the duties flow in both directions - until the one who provides and the one who consumes share the burden of transformation - the accounting will be but another scroll in the archive, a record of a fever taken, not the medicine to cure it.